Building community resilience

About community resilience

Community emergency resilience refers to a community’s ability to ‘bounce back’ after emergency events or very stressful events such as natural disasters, economic downturn, pandemics and other crises.

Connected communities are more resilient and have a higher capacity to withstand and recover from major emergency events.

Our role

We work with communities to build resilience by:

asking communities for feedback on, and helping them identify, their perceived risks

helping them to develop community actions in response to these risks.

Watch this page for information and updates on new projects.

Building community resilience in Upper Beaconsfield

This project aimed to build the resilience of the Upper Beaconsfield community through engagement and community strengtheningactivities.

Throughforumsandcommunitysurveysconducted in 2018, residents were asked to identify their strengths as a community, and to think about what they could do to become more resilient.

Manyrespondentssaidstrengtheningcommunityconnections was important for building resilience in the localcommunity.

Asaresult of this community feedback, the Upper Beaconsfield Fuel Management Project was developed. Council is also supporting the Upper Beaconsfield Community Centre to hold a Neighbour Day event onMarch31st2019.

Upper Beaconsfield Fuel Management project

The Upper Beaconsfield Fuel Management Project aims to address bushfire risks across public and private land. It has been developed based on the community feedback received in the Upper Beaconsfield Building Resilience pilot project.

A community stakeholder committee has been formed to develop community actions. Currently, it is developing community-specific fuel management actions for implementation.

An information day was held in March to provide the most up-to-date data and advice to community.

Upper Beaconsfield Fuel Management Information Day

The Upper Beaconsfield Community Fuel Management Information Day was held on Sunday 31 March at the Upper Beaconsfield Community House.

Online forum outcomes

The Upper Beaconsfield Have Your Say page allowed community members to share their ideas for bushfire fuel management.

An online forum was open for 1 month from 17 February to 17 March 2019. It was launched with a drop-in stall at the Upper Beaconsfield Festival and sucessfullyengaged a large number of Upper Beaconsfield residents.